IE December Security Update Now Available

This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by correcting the control and by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles objects in memory. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer.

I encourage everybody to download this security update and other non-IE security updates via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Windows users are also strongly encouraged to configure their systems for automatic updates to keep their systems current with the latest updates from Microsoft.

i just wish the rss update issue would get fixed. my feeds will not update after i resume from sleep mode and i get tired of having to disable and enable msfeedsync so they will update on schedule, instead of 12 hours from now.

this has been going on for a year now. please release the fix, that supposedly was checked in 3 months ago.

I’m not sure which plugin is doing this but I’m finding in our in-house web app that IE8 will randomly open popup windows (as intended) but not "fetch" the page. (e.g. no HTTP Get request is ever sent (checked with Fiddler)) (so all you get is a blank white page)

It is totally random, and the same link pasted elsewhere works fine and the popup works fine in all other browsers and IE6 and IE7.

However once it does happen, loading that popup page will fail repeatedly until the browser is closed and restarted.

There is no JS error (on the popup or the opener)

I’m going to try turning off all addons and slowly re-introduce them but its a pain due to the random nature – I can only "verify" if the issue happens, not if an addon is "clean".

Have other developers reported any issues like this?

Since I’ve really only started seeing this in the past 2 months I suspect one of the developer addons like:

– AOL pagetest

– DynaTrace AJAX edition

– MyFast (MySpace YSlow equiv.)

– Google pagespeed

– IE developer toolbar (I don’t think this has changed much recently – I’m just trying to use it more now to debug)

– Fiddler2 (I got some updates for this recently)

I’m not finger pointing (I don’t care which addon it is) I would just like to be able to isolate and remove the glitch from my dev environment(s) and test beds.

@Matt – Darn, you’re right! I did forget those – oh, and the ability to have IE 3, 4, 5, 5.5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 installed simultaneously without any kind of dll conflict.

Migrate to webkit too, in your own time MS, but now would be good 🙂

I bash MS just as much as anyone else but sometimes I do feel kinda sorry for Dean and Eric and the stuff that gets hurled to them on here, so hopefully my posts today have put a little smile on their faces. Now get back to work, slackers 🙂

@IE8Plugin: It’s definitely the case that some of the performance tracking addons can cause stability issues. I haven’t used MyFast in months, but the version I used was extremely crash-prone.

Fiddler has no impact unless it’s running, and doesn’t have the problem of causing requests to not be shown.

My guess is that whatever the buggy add-on is, it’s leaking HTTP connections, such that the connection limit is exhausted and the new window basically waits forever for a socket to become free. If you try to navigate the main window to a different page on the same site, does it work?

@Chuck: I have no problems with that page. Are you running the latest versions of your addons? Does it crash in no-addons mode?

The update was installed on my fresh Windows 7 Ultimate x64 laptop last night. IE8 is now freezing up at many sites even after reseting the browser to default settings. For example http://money.cnn.com freezes the browser. It almost seems like a conflict with flash??

I am see many IE8 freezes in IE since the patches were installed yesterday. I’m even seeing issues with Firefox freezing. My son, who has a similar Win7 x64 system, is also seeing IE8 freeze issues and also his viewer for Second Life now hangs also?? Great patch to end the year with??

remove the search box and integrate it to smart address bar with a Kwiclick(firefox add-ons) functionality. KwiClick opens a dedicated search dialog that finds results from Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and more without having to leave the page. but instead of having a dialog box put the search result inside the smart address bar.

Not sure if it’s plugin based as I had it happen to me in No addons mode.

I found that a bunch of iexplore processes will be running when this happens. Kill those first and then run this cmd script(search IEREREG Version 1.07) that re-register’s a bunch of IE8 dlls and that fixes it.

I think IE 8 works much better in Vista than in XP,dont no about 7,we all know how IE 8 is slow and how new tab takes all the time in the world to open in XP and dont forget the crash we often face.That’s one of the primary reason for the low percentage of people using IE-8.So no matter how much better you make the browser you have to either do one of two things,One make it work in XP,or ask people dump XP which is unlikely in near future

A little question: when installing IE 8 on Windows XP, I get asked to download the latest updates for IE. This is all well and good, but Jscript 5.8 updates don’t get pulled in… Is that normal?

I’d also like to know if IE 9 will be ported to WinXP; eventhough Direct2D will be used on Vista and Seven, I don’t think it’ll work when either of these will support Direct2D in safe mode – and a browser that is unusable in safe mode is useless. So, there must be a gdi+ fallback mode… And IE 9 in XP.

That has a registry script to fix IE. It looks "decent". Is there any chance you can review/endorse this? If not, any chance you can identify which registry items are valid (e.g. to check for)

In the mean time I disabled all my addons – I can’t figure out how to uninstall them – I did find a [Remove] button inside a [more information] link for each addon but it was disabled for each I tried. PS I run with admin rights so I’m not sure why I can’t remove them.

Ever since i upgraded to this Security update every click to change page generates this popup: This page has an unspecified potential security risk, would you like to continue. It is very annoying and time consuming, any fix?.

It’s odd that everyone’s having problems with IE, there’re all update related.

So after I reinstalled Windows XP SP3, I decided not to update my computer with MS updates. It’s still working like it was never used. I updated to IE8, again no updates or plugins (except Flash) and no problems have arised. It boots in about 20 seconds and this is on an ancient AMD Duron 1.2GHz, 1GB RAM machine.

@Facings tanden – IE9 does NOT "pass" the Acid3 test. Passing that test would require a grade of 100% a mark which IE is not even half way close to achieving.

IE9 looks from the previous blog post to be advancing in its support of Web Standards however MSFT hasn’t clarified how the mode setup will work in IE9, which is very important. When IE8 was released it forked the logic from the old Quirks/Standards split to Quirks/Standards/IE8 Standards.

I hope that MSFT seriously reconsiders this approach and changes to cover:

[Quirks/Legacy Standards/Standards]

All other browsers have just Quirks/Standards and are beautiful to code against… add a Doctype and you are in Standards mode – plain and simple.

I’m tired of developing for all the issues in IE – I don’t want to have to do this anymore.

We’re dropping support for IE6 in the new year (2010), and dropping support for IE7 in 2011. Financially and mentally supporting old versions of IE is just not viable any more when there are plenty of alternate browsers that don’t suffer from the years of unfixed bugs that IE does.

I love programming web apps – and if I had millions of dollars I’d still program more web apps…. but I certainly don’t and would not enjoy making them work in IE.

Programming for Safari, Firefox & Chrome is a piece of cake. IE8 running in "better" standards mode is tolerable but IE7 and IE6 are like trying to program web apps to run on Netscape 4.x – just plain horribly annoying.

As I said – I love programming for the Web – but programming for IE is a PITA – plain and simple. I’m not gonna change career paths due to and end-system that can’t keep up. I’ll support it as long as the money allows me to but I’ll be dropping support just like @harold as soon as it no longer makes sense (which by most predictions will happen in 2010)

@thecrochunter: Failing to install updates is a bad idea; you’re putting the system at risk from a security point-of-view, and you’ll never get any fixes for known crashing bugs.

In terms of troubles with updates– while we investigate any reported issues, it’s important to take such reports with a grain of salt– every Windows Update is successfully installed without any problem by many hundreds of millions of users. For some users, the reboot to finish installing the patches is the only reboot they’ve done for many weeks, and the reboot itself may have the side-effect of revealing a configuration problem that occurred weeks ago.

I wish you guys would make a totally new browser like Safari or Chrome, built to be fast fast fast, won’t crash, supports HTML5 and all web standards, doesn’t use anything proprietary, etc. Open source it, too, so that others will build on it. Give it away.

And don’t call it IE. Pick a new name, just like Bing was a new name for Live and is better than Live search. A Bing Browser, perhaps.

You guys are some serious trolls of sorts going on about Webkits this and Webkits that.

Webkits isn’t perfect and Trident isn’t either but have 3+ browsers based on Webkits is a horrible idea. Firefox will be the only one not conforming. No renderer is perfect and Acid 3 isn’t final. Just remember that.

Developers, Developers, Developers…. What is Steve Ballmer talking about? If he is for Developers, then he would tell the IE team to start sticking with web 2.0 standards and make it easier for Developers to support IE.

I made the mistake of downloading IE8 on an XP professional laptop and desktop. I now only use Safari or Firefox on those computers. However, my wife bought me a new laptop with Windows 7 64 bit, IE8 is great on this platform. Another example of MS pushing you towards upgrade, something the 3rd party people love. Safari is much better on non 64 bit machines, then Firefox, IE8 is a long way behind.

Remember how MS tried to kill VB? They are repeating the errors of the past. I agree in both cases that C# is better and so is Win 7, but you can’t bully people forever.

btw the Safari spell check is awsome, Firefox’s is good to. Is it that beyond IE?

@dlh2009: some consider that Web programmers aren’t developers. Maybe Monkey is of that group…?

@WoodyKC: from my testing, IE 8 on XP and on Vista or 7 is functionally identical (it may not have Protected Mode, but since I disable UAC and use limited user accounts on all OSes, it becomes moot) and I couldn’t find any variation in performance nor stability. One thing you can try is remove OEM settings: in a command prompt, run